Okay, okay – so some of you won’t know what I’m on about, and some of you will – but I’ll explain.

I have just recently acquired and set up… wait for it… another machine.

This is probably not that surprising – but what might be surprising to people who know me is that this machine is a Mac. A PowerMac G5 2.5GHz Quad Core: the last of the G5s, in fact.

I’m a big fan of Mad Max – at least, the firsttwo films anyway – so upon hearing myself say to Clare that it was “the last of the G5s”, I immediately thought of that great piece of dialogue referring to the iconic black Pursuit Special in the first film.

I love the naming process for new acquisitions, and I always try to think of something that is in some way apt; thus, the obvious choice for a name had become clear – the Pursuit Special.

After sticking in as much PC2 4200 DDR RAM as I have spare (5GB), I’ve given it fresh install and updated it to OS X 10.5.8 which is the highest version PPC based Macs can handle. I’m currently pissing about with SSH access and tunnelling VNC protocols, and have it set up in such a way that I can use Wake On Lan via the Internets to remotely wake it up using this great utility, which is fun. Sweet magic packets. I’ve gotten hold of a few nice free utilities, plus a nice chap has given me a paid copy of TechTool Pro which comes with the AppleCare support plan. I also plan to put in a second-hand airport card if I can get my hands on one for a few quid.

Of course, this is not entirely necessary as it has a wired gigabit connection, but I want to pimp it out as much as possible. It’s an old machine and has undoubtedly been worked very hard during its life, but despite this I want to make the best of it. No point having a Mac if I’m not going to soup it up as much as possible, right? Just like the (real) Pursuit Special.

As I have previously written, I currently dual-boot my netbook into Ubuntu and WinXP. The point really of all these OS shenanigans is that I need to work on my Mac and Linux/UNIX skills. OS X uses Darwin as the UNIX underbelly of the beast, so ever the fan of the humble CLI, I hope that it will help me with both in a sort of two-pronged learning attack. I’ve been working more and more with the Macs at work in an attempt to become the sort of go-to guy for Mac support, as previously it’s always been a hole in my knowledge. My career in standard Windows desktop support looks increasingly bleak, so it’s high time I did something about that.